The aim of this talk is to present the basic theory of adversarial signal processing, with motivating examples taken from the fields of watermarking, multimedia forensics, traffic analysis, intrusion detection, biometrics, cognitive radio, etc. We will focus on adversarial hypothesis testing, which is arguably the best understood topic. As a fundamental approach we will show how to use game theory to model the available strategies to both defender and adversary. In some cases of interest, it is possible to find an equilibrium of the game which gives the optimum strategies for both parties and the performance that each can achieve. One interesting instance where such equilibrium exists is the so-called “source identification game”, which has applications in media forensics, biometrics, network traffic analysis and fraud detection, to name a few.

One of the drawbacks of designing an information processing system under the assumption that an adversary is present is that the solutions generally lead to very conservative designs, which in turn yield a bad performance when the adversary is not there. A possibility, to overcome such a problem, is to run a detection meta-test, aiming at detecting the presence of the adversary. A nice example of such an approach, and the resulting race of arms between the meta-detector and the adversary is the case of sensitivity attacks in watermarking, hill climbing attacks in biometrics and the ACRE (adversarial classifier reverse engineering) attack in machine learning, which we will discuss in this talk. We will reveal the striking similarities between these attacks, and how they can be abstracted to build a comprehensive theory. Then we will present some recent results in the design of a meta-detector aiming at distinguishing malicious queries which are submitted as part of a sensitive attack, from normal queries submitted by non-malevolent users.